Tony Leon Blog

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

YOU
couldn‘t make it up. Peering at the world through chic European spectacles,
shod in Italian shoes, chauffeured in a German car and the beneficiary of
R25-million from a US-listed mining house, National Assembly Speaker Baleka
Mbete assailed Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema — and for even
worse than being a “cockroach”.

According
to a report of her speech in North West last weekend, Mbete — the person
mandated by the constitution to ensure his parliamentary rights — said proud
anti-imperialist Malema was actually “working with some Western countries in
their quest to take over South Africa”.

﻿﻿﻿﻿

Malema,
who sports an überexpensive Swiss Breitling watch and is hoofed in Gucci
loafers, repaid this rhetoric in similarly debased currency in parliament on
Tuesday. He accused President Jacob Zuma of referring a bill back to parliament
because of pressure from Western companies.

﻿﻿﻿﻿

Mbete‘s
subsequent and welcome apology for her attack on Malema simply underpins the
incompatibility of being, simultaneously, a top gun in the ANC leadership and
the presumed protector of members‘ interests, including those in the
opposition.

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Thabo Mbeki

But
in the midst of this inflammation of hypocrisy and rhetoric, spare a thought
for the institution that these two polarising figures — and one-time allies —
represent.

Before
interrogating their roles in debasing parliament, we should in fact thank
Malema and Mbete for highlighting two fundamental trends.

Malema,
more than any individual in the past dozen or more years, has reinvented
parliament as the centre of the national discourse and attention. Mbete, in
turn, has made blatant that which, before last Thursday‘s night of national
shame, was done through back-door manoeuvring.

Certain
signposts on parliament‘s downward road are illuminating.

First,
under Thabo Mbeki the national legislature became, as I once described it, a
“forum for non-debates and non-accountability”.

Mbeki
got away with skipping question time and ministers routinely evaded censure for
not answering questions because the executive amassed power outside of
parliament and the opposition regarded itself as bound by the rules of the
institution.

Respect
for the office of the president was then absolute, and even I, the leader of
the opposition to his administration, would stand up before and after Mbeki‘s
speeches. He was the fortunate beneficiary of the mantle of his sainted
predecessor, Nelson Mandela.

Also,
despite his prickly personality, evasion of accountability, inflicting ruinous
HIV/Aids policies on his people and green-lighting stolen elections in
Zimbabwe, there was no stain on his personal conduct in matters of state.

Mbeki
also helped to create, and presided over, a growing economy. Critical elements
of civil society, from the press to the business community, therefore simply
averted their gaze from the predations under way in parliament.

But
it was during these post-Mandela years that parliament‘s rot began. Perhaps the
greatest white-anting of the institution was hobbling parliament‘s quest to
investigate the arms deal. In late 2001, the executive rewrote the damaging
conclusions of the joint investigative task team into the affair, in the hand
of the president‘s parliamentary enforcer, Essop Pahad.

This
lessened its damning conclusions and protected the cabinet. But it damaged
parliament. The infamous arms deal — the hard case that settled into bad
parliamentary and political precedent — first detonated most of the
institutional damage made plain in more recent times.

The
first person who was convicted of corruption in this saga was Schabir Shaik,
whose acts of corruption deeply implicated Mbeki‘s successor, Zuma. Zuma‘s
escape from the coils of his own corruption charges, which haunt his
presidency, hobbled parliament long before he assumed the highest office.

The
2001 strong-arming of parliamentary processes to protect the executive
occurred, ironically, under the speakership of Dr Frene Ginwala. She otherwise
provided a form of independence from the encroachment of the ruling party on
the rights of opposition members and had, in the main, some regard for the
rights and privileges of the institution over which she presided.

But
even her impartiality and independence — rickety though they proved at that
defining moment — were too much for the rampant presidency. After Mbeki‘s
emphatic re-election in 2004, she was fired as speaker. Her replacement was
Mbete, in her first of two terms as speaker.

By
this time, the ANC no longer countenanced robust contestation by the opposition
or even the occasional free-wheeling of its own members. During the Mandela
era, frontline cabinet minister Joe Slovo had been able to question the
necessity of the arms acquisition, and free-spirited ANC backbencher and singer
Jennifer Ferguson could abstain on the abortion vote.

Now
Mbete was joined in a quest for total control by the deeply militaristic Tony
Yengeni, who was installed as the ANC‘s chief whip.

In
this combination lay further seeds of decay. Question time was curtailed,
follow-ups were limited and the speaker was accorded the right to “vet”
questions to the president.

The
speaker then defiled her office in 2006 by being at the front of the queue to
wave Yengeni off to jail. He was the second political figure to be named, then
convicted and imprisoned, for accepting an arms deal bribe. But the real stain
on Mbete‘s office was that Yengeni had in fact been convicted of defrauding
parliament, the very institution the speaker was entrusted to protect.

The
next milepost on this slippery slope was “Travelgate”. In 2007, five years
after the whistle was blown (and the whistle-blower victimised) 32 MPs received
criminal convictions and sentences for cheating parliament, but the speaker
allowed them to hold on to their parliamentary seats. The institution was now
truly discredited.

Little
surprise, then, that in 2007, when I vacated my parliamentary and political
leadership, my successor, Helen Zille, declined to lead the main opposition
party from parliament, choosing to do so from the City of Cape Town and later
from the provincial legislature. Her decision both underlined and assisted the
sidelining of the national legislature.

Enter
Malema and the EFF, stage left, after last year‘s elections. Alongside 399
other MPs, Malema swore to uphold the rules embedded in the functioning of the
legislature — but had, from day one, no intention of being bound by them.

No
longer dealing with a rule-bound opposition force, the ANC realised that the
old approach of back-door manoeuvring and the emollient and inclusive approach
of Mbete‘s successor as speaker, Max Sisulu, would not suffice. Time to recall
Mbete, now also ANC chairwoman, to fly the party flag and enforce its diktat
from the speaker‘s throne.

Then
the Nkandla bomb exploded. It was the gift that kept on giving to what was now,
on this issue at least, a united opposition.

From
his minor perch of just over 20 seats, Malema, aided by a report of the public
protector, seized the moment. With just four words — “pay back the money” — he
branded Zuma as an unaccountable and self-enriching politician. Untroubled by
the mayhem he unleashed, Malema had captured the national spotlight.

Last
Thursday night, before the state of the nation chaos unfolded before a now
enthralled, possibly horrified, nation, an opposition MP asked a cabinet minister
what he expected to happen. This was in the light of Malema‘s threat to demand
the missing answers to the question he had attempted to ask of an unresponsive
and, later, absent president.

“Whatever
else, the speech will go ahead,” was the reply given.

And
so it did. But in the process the naked use of force, the illegal jamming of
cellphone signals and the sight of a president suffering an acute form of
political autism were made plain. The security state made its unattractive
reappearance 25 years after the enforced departure of securocrat-in-chief PW
Botha.

But
this time the pushback was different, more diverse and much stronger.

No
longer could the executive trample constitutional rights underfoot. Two court
applications immediately ensued and are ongoing. The press gallery, in an
unprecedented display of revulsion, rose in protest. The leader of the official
opposition, Mmusi Maimane, found his true voice, perhaps for the first time.

His “a broken man presiding over a broken
society” mantra was aimed at Zuma. But it probably resonates way beyond the
opposition constituency.

The
speaker remains in office but, even post-apology, is bereft of authority and
legitimacy.

In
a constitutional democracy, might does not equate with right.

Authority
has to be coupled with principled persuasion.

In
the debate this week, it seemed that all parties had pulled back from the
brink. The presiding officers were at pains to make even-handed rulings, and
Malema read out a speech of thudding dullness, but left his wrecking ball at
home.

And,
for the first time in many years, both the nation and the state were entirely
focused on parliament. In the wreckage of recent events lie, hopefully, the
seeds of renewal.

*
Leon was a member of parliament from 1989 to 2009 and leader of the official
opposition from 1999 to 2007

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Amid
the chaos of last week's state of the address, President Zuma rehashed old
ideas that will do more harm than good to SA

19 Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:Rand Daily Mail

Look
beyond, if you can, the violent distractions on display in Parliament last
week. Ignore even the curious head-dress borrowed, it seems, from Hiawatha's
cupboard, of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Even the laugh, or rictus, of our
president will fade over time.

Drill
down into the content of President Jacob Zuma's speech and you get a glimpse of
the future, even though much of its language and imagery came from the past.
There are parts of it which create much foreboding and which should cause as
much concern about our economic prospects going forward as the din and clamour
inside and outside Parliament last Thursday suggested about the failing health
of our democracy.

Speaker
Baleka Mbete should know that "cockroaches" are well-nigh
indestructible, having been recorded as even surviving nuclear fallout. Zuma
must equally know that even when regents thought they had divine gifts, King
Canute could not turn back the tide. In modern economies in the tough,
take-no-prisoners world in which we operate, and where real jobs are created
and currencies pummelled, there is no room for wishful thinking or untested or,
worse, disproved policies.

Yet
buried in the text and the laundry list of measures outlined by Zuma last week
we had plenty of what Gabriel García Márquez called "magical realism"
on display.

Strangely,
Zuma got bashed by the estimable Financial Mail when, in his charm offensive in
Pretoria with journalists days before his speech, he was heard to complain that
"technology was costing jobs". Never mind the fact that this is part
of the parcel of blaming external conditions for the local state of our
affairs; there is a profound truth in what Zuma articulated.

We
live today in an "Uber on-demand economy". Harvard’s Prof Yochai
Benkler described the changing world of work as follows: "They are the
people formerly known as employees. In a broad range of service industries, workers
who once drew a steady salary are cutting out the employer and plying their
services direct to people who used to pay companies, rather than people, to
meet their needs."

Or
to use a well-cited example: a few years ago when Facebook (which did not exist
a decade ago) bought photo-sharing site Instagram, it paid a whopping
$1-billion for a company that employed only 13 people.

In
the same year, Kodak, which at its height employed 145 000 people, went
bankrupt. As The Economist notes, "the new economy is remarkably light on
workers".

That's
the scary world we live in and to which South Africa, a small economy,
dependent on and buffeted by these forces, needs to accommodate itself, and not
imagine Canute-like that it can reverse these tides.

But
there was no following echo, or even recognition of this reality in the state
of the nation speech. Indeed, the very script which Zuma and the South African
delegation read with some apparent success to the World Economic Forum seems to
have been discarded. In the Swiss Alps we proclaimed to investors that
"South Africa was open for business", and cited the
investor-certainty in the National Development Plan.

Back
home, in the Sona speech, we seem to have slammed the door shut and reheated
yesterday's announcement with the day-before-yesterday's ideas.

At
the Mining Indaba, leading foreign investors indicated that mining companies
were "sitting on their wallets" when it came to investing in our
bedrock industry. Mineral Resources Minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi confessed that
he had been ambushed by ministerial colleagues into reneging on a closely
fought agreement with the local Chamber of Mines on the vexed issue of
"gate prices" for local strategic minerals.

Instead,
we are to enter the brave and state-imposed world of "development
pricing". In effect it is an asset-grab, which even roused the normally
shy Chamber of Mines to declare this will "break the back of the South
African mining industry".

Zuma
said not a word on this controversy. He spoke of mining as the "backbone
of the economy" but simply ignored the fire lit by his own government to
immolate it.

But
he did offer further legislation to "promote worker rights" and to
"regulate" the practices of "private employment agencies".
All this is intended to "prevent the abuse of unsuspecting
workseekers".

It
will simply further remove our country from the reality of the world we are in,
rather than the socialist utopia the ANC dreams to inhabit.

The
speech also gave a half-nod against the madness of the tourist visa regime
which threatens to choke the one growth industry which could supplant ageing
and uncompetitive mining as a job-creator and nation-saver. It will be recalled
that the new visa regulations were announced last year without a single study
or pilot project.

Now
Zuma tells us "we will prioritise a review" of them. I suppose
putting the cart after the horse is better than disposing of the animal
completely.

But
just before this announcement, he proclaimed — without any evidence to motivate
— that the government would ban foreign land ownership entirely and limit farm
owners to 12 000ha. Why not 5 000 or 50 000 is not explained; nor is the likely
benefit even alluded to at all. I can think of multiple harm in terms of
crushing foreign investment and promoting food insecurity; these too are left
unaddressed.

Presidents
today, no less than divine-right kings of old can, despite their pomp, powers
and privileges, in truth not do much to change the economic forces of life.
But, as every good doctor knows, they should be bound by the equivalent of the
Hippocratic Oath: "Above all, do no harm."

Monday, February 16, 2015

Julius Malema has chosen to participate in
Parliament, yet regards himself unbound by its rules and precedents, writes
Tony Leon

THURSDAY night’s debacle in Parliament reminded me of a spectacularly
bad football match. Instead of focusing on the man with the ball, the
spectators’ attention pivots to the activities away from the centrepiece — the
offside players, the deliberate fouls, the baying crowd and the biased referee.

Indeed, even before play commenced for the state of the nation address,
the police water-cannoning of opposition supporters outside Parliament and
arrest of an opposition MP salted the clues for what was to follow. Never mind
the fist in the velvet glove, the country and the world would soon see just the
unfurled fist.

Stripped of subtlety, South African Communist Party boss and Higher
Education Minister Blade Nzimande announced after the melee of storming
policemen and injured MPs, his fist apparently hitting his palm: "We had
to show them who is in charge." And so you did, Blade, so you did.

Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema. Picture: PETER MOGAKI

Indeed, the government’s enchantment, or the enthusiastic security
cohort within it, for all things Chinese was also on display. "The great
firewall of China" — historian Niall Ferguson’s slogan for the communist
government’s blocking of unwanted social media — also descended briefly on
Parliament.

Persons unknown — but one can hazard a guess — jammed cellphone signals
out of the National Assembly. In one of the few clear goals scored by the
opposition on Thursday night, and not on offer in China, Democratic Alliance
chief whip John Steenhuizen invoked the constitution to persuade the speaker to
restore it.

A decade or so ago, the opposition which I then led and the government
of Zuma’s predecessor actually had a debate of sorts, without assistance from
the police. I used the reversible raincoat rhetoric which seemed apt for such
sonorous events as the state of the nation debate. "There’s nothing wrong
with the nation," I declaimed. "It’s the state that’s the
problem." Both before, and especially after, last Thursday both seem to be
in crisis. But how deep is the crisis and what does it tell us, to borrow Will
Hutton’s title of a book of his, "the state that we’re in"?

The day after the address I received a call from former newspaper editor
Tim du Plessis, a thoughtful veteran of our tumultuous past 30 years of
history-in-the-making. After agreeing that the last rites being read by some
for our fledgling democracy were a mite premature, he reminded me of a brutal
page from our recent past. It was in that most fateful of years, 1993, between
the assassination of Chris Hani in April and the finalisation of the interim
constitution in November. One June morning at the World Trade Centre in Kempton
Park, the buffoonish but sinister Eugene Terre’Blanche and his Afrikaner
Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) right-wing forces invaded the talks venue with an
armoured car and men on horseback. The latter-day burghers succeeded in
smashing part of the glazed façade of the conference centre, and, for a while,
took charge as delegates scurried to safety.

Du Plessis noted that, on that afternoon, everything seemed far more at
risk than it did after last Thursday night. I then remembered that my late
predecessor, Zach de Beer, told our delegates’ group that he doubted
"whether even the Archangel Gabriel, were he to descend among us, could
reason and restore peace between the government and its right-wing foes".

In far more earthly and recent form than the archangel, the country
noted the failure of Pastor Ray McCauley to repair relations between the
African National Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose
tactics bear more than a passing resemblance to the fascists of the AWB.

Of course, history now records that, as with other right-wing ruses of
that time, the sound and fury and the real fear invoked by them did little to
retard the momentum of the process they tried in vain to stop.

But there are other big differences between then and now, which offer a
less reassuring prospect for the future. First, there is the biggest disrupter
of all, Julius Malema and his EFF. Business thought leader Clayton Christensen
of Harvard Business School has written an entire book, The Innovator’s Dilemma,
on the power of disruption. Or, how bad and cheap products can usurp
long-settled brands and market leaders. One example he cites is how in the
1950s, the cheap and tinny and initially bad-quality Japanese transistor radio
in short time overwhelmed the established radiograms of my grandmother’s era,
which would soon disappear entirely from the shelves.

In some ways, the EFF is a classic disrupter. But unlike the AWB, Malema
has chosen to participate in Parliament, yet appears to regard himself unbound
by its rules, conventions and precedents. Strip away, for a moment, Zuma’s
ducking and diving on the Nkandla questions and the shield offered to him by
speaker Baleka Mbete and the way she puts the opposition to the sword. How
should Malema’s disruptions be dealt with in a parliamentary democracy, where
the rules of robust engagement are not a licence to pillage parliamentary
privilege and bring down the House?

Presumably, and perhaps fatefully, the speaker and her party colleagues
decided to confuse means and ends. Parliament and the people who elect it are
indeed entitled to demand proper debate and not the one-trick-pony antics of
serial disrupters. But when armed heavies, signal jamming and the full
apparatus of the PW Botha iron fist are unleashed, then it may be said that
they "destroy better than they know".

Or perhaps they — the current rulers — know only too well and simply do
not care, which brings us to the second fork in the road set out at Kempton
Park in 1993. Although the parliamentary building, even the Tuynhuys
presidential office next door, were designed to the architectural
specifications of PW Botha, the democratic furniture of our new order was cut
from new and radically different cloth. We were meant, among other things, to
replace the culture of authority with that of persuasion; democracy in place of
brute force. Yet what was unveiled on Thursday night was far too reminiscent of
the old era and seemed to bury the new.

But one group of people who have powers in the new era they never
possessed in the old is the judiciary. Conspicuously, as armed police entered
the chamber, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng exited it. One of the judges
president present was also reported as shouting at a policeman: "If you’re
armed you had better get out of here." The chastened policeman duly left.
In such small events we can derive some comfort.

Perhaps even more extraordinary was the very public demand of Malema
that he be treated as a liberal. He demanded of the speaker that she judge his
MPs and their behaviour as "individuals and not as a collective".
Hugo Chavez, his late inspiration, must be spinning in his grave.

Finally, what of the player at the centre of it all? When Zuma finally
rose to speak, he faced an open goal, after so many on his side had netted own
goals. Doctors are confronted with a trick question during training: "What
treatment is offered by ear in an emergency?" The correct answer is,
"words of comfort".

Zuma’s nation had watched the spectacle before he spoke, dismayed and
appalled. He would have scored big had he even alluded to it and, as the man at
the apex of our now damaged democracy, offered words of comfort, reassurance
and repaired the breach. But he laughed and said not a word about it.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

What might have happened had PW Botha
not succumbed to a stroke and handed power to his successor?

4
Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:Rand Daily
MailCHAOS,
in local politics anyway, apparently spirals downward. Channelling their
"inner EFF", ANC Cape Town city councillors last week decided to
mimic their national foes by imitating the disruptive tactics of Julius
Malema's opposition fighters and applying them in one of the few places where
the party finds itself in opposition.

DA
mayor Patricia de Lille, with a leaf from the book of parliamentary Speaker
Baleka Mbete, obliged them by calling in the police to lock them out.

The
clichés "when the shoe is on the other foot" and "imitation is
the sincerest form of flattery" hardly seem to do justice to this latest
act in the theatre of the absurd, which seems to substitute for real debate in
our national melodrama.

One
of the items on the council agenda that inspired the EEF-like tactics of the
local ANC was the decision to rename a portion of Table Bay Boulevard in honour
of former president FW de Klerk.

Strangely
enough, for a party that believes the majority is always right, it opposed a
decision that obtained more than 75% public support and had been endorsed by
local luminaries such as Desmond Tutu.

Elsewhere
in South Africa, street renaming has some ANC provenance.

Since
Table Bay Boulevard is a motorway rather than a residential road, it should
also be less inconvenient than matters doubtless were for, let us say,
residents of Cowey Road in Durban.

They
woke up one day a few years ago in the city of my birth to discover, courtesy
of the local ANC council, that they now resided in "Problem Mkhize Road''.
Mkhize was a big figure in the local MK structures but not perhaps a person of
world renown. And, just maybe, reselling your home in a street beginning with
the name "Problem'' might be, well, problematic.

No
matter. The objection to De Klerk was not that he did not make history, with
his epoch-changing speech in Parliament 25 years ago this week but that, for
the national majority, or at least their leaders, he was on the wrong side of
it.

Of
course, for the majority of residents in Cape Town, De Klerk was their
political leader of choice in the two elections he contested at the helm of his
party.

In
the first democratic poll in 1994 and the local government election which
followed it in 1996, they voted in large numbers for him. So if street names,
in part, should reflect the preferences of local residents, this small matter
should be both uncontroversial and democratically appropriate.

But
the big controversy around this was captured by ANC council leader Tony
Ehrenreich, who also moonlights as Cosatu's Western Cape secretary, or perhaps
the other way around. He said De Klerk was "an architect of apartheid and
responsible for implementing a system that brutally oppressed the
majority".

Actually,
it would be more accurate to say that De Klerk's party and even his family (his
uncle was the hard-line prime minister JG Strijdom) were the architects. But I
quibble. The crux of the Ehrenreich objection appears in the next line:
"[De Klerk] was an accident of history who just happened to be the leader
of the National Party and was forced to negotiate with the ANC."

As
British journalist Andrew Rawnsley wrote in another context: "That's
post-hoc analysis from Professor Harry Hindsight at the Faculty of Wise After
the Fact."

While
South Africa seems to have many graduates from Professor Hindsight's faculty
these days, it is perhaps worth reframing the question and the day on which De
Klerk turned his back on 350 years of history and started a process that would
see him ejected from supreme power in just four years.

Of
all the "what if?" questions, let us entertain the Ehrenreich theory
at its root.

What
might have been or might not have happened had PW Botha not succumbed to a
severe stroke the year before and reluctantly handed the reins of power to his
successor, or had them forced from his hand to be perfectly accurate?

Strangely
enough, one person far more significant than the latter-day re-writers of
history who believed it made little difference was none other than the mighty
Nelson Mandela. He once told me, to my surprise, that he "far preferred
dealing with Botha than with De Klerk".

Last
week, I discovered I was hardly alone in being startled by this observation.

Former
British Ambassador to South Africa Robin Renwick has produced his own account
of the dramatic transition from apartheid to democracy entitled Mission to
South Africa — Diary of a Revolution.

In
some ways the book is a mixed bag. The prose is lumpy and it doesn't drop names
so much as carpet-bomb the reader with them. It also covers a lot of already
very well-trodden turf.

But
Renwick was certainly a star in the diplomatic firmament and, as a top-ranking
ambassador, a very accurate recorder of intimate encounters with the good and
the great.

He
recounts, after his retirement from his post here and Mandela's election as
president, that he went to visit the icon in Pretoria to discuss the trashing
of De Klerk.

He
writes: "Whatever [Mandela's and De Klerk's] disagreements, I reminded him
he should please bear in mind that, but for De Klerk, he would not have been
elected president and might still be in jail.

"Mandela
characteristically informed his assistant that the 'ambassador is right'
(though I had ceased to be one), adding that De Klerk had richly deserved his
Nobel Peace Prize, 'for he had made peace possible'."

It is abundantly clear that
President Jacob Zuma faces a tough time in parliament for the remainder of his
term in office.

Opposition parties, especially
the red irritants, as some governing party MPs disparagingly describe the EFF,
are there to make sure he giggles as little as possible.

It is not clear though what
Zuma’s strategy will be in response to the increasingly sharper arguments,
finger-wagging and general rowdiness directed at him.

Zuma’s predecessors had their
own strategies and personalities to contain a vocal opposition. Nelson Mandela
used his aura, or what the political scientist John Kane calls “moral capital”
to command respect across political parties.

Tony Leon, the ambitious leader
of a tiny Democratic Party at the time, had the unpopular task of challenging
Mandela on a range of policy matters. But whatever the challenge from opposition
benches, Mandela had one important defence that no politician could master ...
just being Mandela.

So respectful of him, MPs
volunteered to reduce the number of question time sessions on account of his
frailty.

The manner in which parliament
interacted with him also gave the institution a huge quantum of what
businessman Reuel Khoza calls the “moral quotient”.

However, even with the high
moral ground on which he walked, Mandela could still feel the blows coming from
the likes of Leon.

To counter this he employed
appeasement and wooing tactics.

He offered Leon a cabinet post
on the basis that opposition views would best be articulated within government
where they stood a chance of being translated to policy.

Although the offer was packaged
as a typical Mandela reconciliation move, it was carefully designed to weaken
the opposition.

The IFP, the largest black
opposition at the time and which had its leader enjoying the perks in
government, would later learn the difficulty of singing with two voices.

Mandela’s strategy was an
attempt to rid the opposition of its sharp teeth. Leon rejected the offer and
went on to gain more votes for his party using all manner of divisive campaign
tricks in subsequent elections.

But Mandela however succeeded in
crafting a culture of mutual respect between the executive and opposition
during the early years of democratic state building.

Enter Thabo Mbeki. Except for
those he co-opted into his cabinet Mbeki had a generally frosty relationship
with the opposition, made worse by his views on HIV-Aids and his policy on
Zimbabwe.

But it was hardly personal. Only
once was an opposition member sanctioned for violating Mbeki’s privacy after
Douglas Gibson visited Mbeki’s retirement home and questioned how it was
funded.

Mbeki’s agenda rhetorically and
in practice was to fast-track state institution building and transformation
initiated under Mandela. He was attacked mainly for his policy choices and
decisions.

He had a defence different from
Mandela’s. His main strategy was to intellectually bludgeon the opposition.
They would complain that he was very cold. They missed Mandela’s warmth. But
they couldn’t take away Mbeki’s bravery and his intellect.

Quite often he would turn the
sharper edge of the knife against Leon and the rest of the highly critical
opposition MPs. If Mandela’s strength was his moral standing, Mbeki’s was his
intellectual and scholarly approach.

Who will forget the exchange
between Leon and Mbeki on the global economy? In one of the last sessions
before his infamous recall, it was Mbeki who came to Speaker Baleka Mbete’s
defence and not the other way around when Leon demanded answers from the
president during a question session.

Leon had asked a question about
the development round of trade negotiations and the implications for South
Africa. It was a very technical question and Mbete felt the president would
need more time to prepare to answer.

After a brief exchange between
Mbete and Leon, Mbeki eventually offered to “try to answer” the question. The
“try” turned out to be a long lecture on the global political economy for which
he got a standing ovation. It must have been a humbling moment for Leon, who
must have felt he had cornered the president.

Also in Mbeki’s arsenal of
defence were MPs who ate of out of his palm. It is no secret that during
Mbeki’s tenure Exclusive Books had more clients from among the parliamentary
benches of the governing party.

It was demeaning of ANC MPs to
ask: “Honourable president can you reiterate what you said...” Or some question
like that.

Zuma is neither Mandela nor
Mbeki. His elevation was fractious from the start when opposition MPs tried to
block his election.

He was the first to draw on his
party’s strength to defend him against a motion of no confidence and when he
had to deal with the Nkandla scandal.

He was the first to be heckled by
junior opposition MPs. How he plans to deals with these is ongoing highly
personalised, though not entirely devoid of principle, attacks on him will
contribute a lot to his legacy.

So far he has continued to open
more avenues for opposition MPs to unleash punches on him. Can he use the
tricks he deploys on state organs to tame the opposition?

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla are great examples of the rainbow dream that South Africans have been letting go of recent.

I won't
offer an opinion on whether President Jacob Zuma or Zelda la Grange is right on
whether South Africa's troubles began with the arrival on these shores of Jan
van Riebeeck.

I also
don't know the exact genealogy of the Pretoria-based De Villiers family. But I
suppose that if it weren't for that consequential landing in the Cape on April
6 1652, South Africa might never have laid claim to the cricketing genius and
force of nature Wanderers and the world saw last Sunday when AB de Villiers
smashed his way into the history books.

There
are, for once, too few superlatives to describe such an instinctively brilliant
player, in any sporting realm. Dr Ali Bacher, no slouch at the crease himself
and someone who knows a thing or two about high-pressure test captaincies, is
not normally given to exaggeration.

His take
on De Villiers scoring the fastest one-day international century hardly seems
over the top, given that De Villiers scored 104 off just 31 balls, including 10
sixes. "In my opinion, AB is the most brilliant, innovative batsman the
world has ever seen," Bacher enthused after watching De Villiers's
demolition of the West Indian bowling at the Bullring.

With so
few, if any, political role models to inspire South Africa these days, perhaps
focusing on sporting heroes will lift the national spirit and light the
load-shedding darkness soon to be thrust upon us, courtesy of either Eskom or
apartheid, but probably not to be blamed on Van Riebeeck. He was a candles-only
man.

Our great
cricketing rivals, Australia, spend far more time and money incubating
prodigies like De Villiers by fast-tracking them to state-funded academies and
training camps at an early age.

Perhaps
in the case of AB de Villiers it's just as well he was not spotted for one
sport early on, because then he might never have taken up international
cricket. His embarrassment of sporting riches includes junior records and
national selection in practically everything else: rugby, tennis, swimming,
athletics and badminton.

But the
Aussies also have the order of things in life right - they revere sports stars
and disparage their politicians. I witnessed this phenomenon at a Bledisloe Cup
rugby test against New Zealand on a starry night in Sydney in September 2001.

One of
the most successful captains of Australian rugby, John Eales, was to lead his
team onto the field against New Zealand for the last time. The capacity crowd
cheered him to the rafters when the stadium announcer reeled off his superb
achievements.

The same
disembodied voice then announced the arrival of "the prime minister of
Australia, Mr John Howard". And the same capacity crowd lustily booed the
man they had voted into office three times and would do so twice more.

De
Villiers, of course, didn't write his name in the history books because someone
appointed him to the position or because he fitted some or other sociological
or demographic profile. He did it on sheer merit and the "10000 hour
rule," which, journalist and researcher Malcolm Gladwell reminds us, is
the backbreaking effort and temperament needed to supplement even outsized
talent.

This
point was underlined last year by none other than Sports Minister Fikile
Mbalula. At the costly 2014 SA Sports Awards he proclaimed: "I have never
made an excuse for mediocrity. I will never shy away from pulling an
extravaganza to celebrate the winning spirit of South Africa."

Alas, any
of his ministerial colleagues, while not shy of extravaganzas, would have a
problem with Mbalula's denunciation of mediocrity.

For a
range of reasons, despite their celebrity status, few sports stars - no matter
where in the world - do well in politics. Temperament and money might provide
some clues here. But even when they take the plunge, few succeed unreservedly.
Another sporting great named De Villiers, Springbok captain Dawie, managed to
lose his marginal parliamentary seat in 1981. He found another one, but his
winning aura was dented. The same thing happened to British Olympic hero
Sebastian Coe. His global fame was no protection against the Tony Blair
electoral tide which swept him out of the once-safe Tory seat of Falmouth and
Camborne in 1997.

In
Pakistan, cricketing legend-turned-politician Imran Khan has tried in vain
since 1996 to translate his popularity into presidential power.

One MP
here who has some sporting form from way back is the president of the almost
lifeless COPE, Mosiuoa Lekota. It is from his soccer-playing days that he
derived his nickname, "Terror".

Whatever
his failures of political leadership, he is a certifiably non-racial player and
a man of unusual eloquence and thoughtful insights.

In a letter
to The Times this week he borrowed the powerful imagery of the Wanderers
partnership of De Villiers and his other record-breaking teammate, Hashim Amla,
to revive the all-but-buried nation-building of Nelson Mandela.

"Let's
set aside victimhood and build bridges," Lekota wrote. "Like Hashim
Amla, we can look to compile our societal gains incrementally, or like AB de
Villiers we can seek to get over the confines of racism in a hurry by hitting
it out of the ground so it disappears forever."

There's
another point of light which the Amla-De Villiers partnership offers to a world
dimmed by the fundamentalist violence witnessed in Paris and Nigeria just days
before the match.

Amla is a
devout Muslim and De Villiers a practising Christian. Their partnership
inspires and builds hope. Which seems a better vision to celebrate than
debating Van Riebeeck.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Something is far from kosher in Equatorial Guinea, but
the ‘moralists’ are turning a blind eye to it

20 Jan 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:Rand Daily Mail

There’s a question, coupled with
a riddle, designed to shake off the back-to-work blues: Which is the richest
country, per head of population, in Africa? Theoretically at least, each
citizen there should be more than three times richer than the average South
African.

Clue: If you have not paid much
attention to it before Monday this week, you should now know the country, as
its city of Mongomo, home town of its president, was the site of Bafana's
defeat by Algeria in the African Cup of Nations.

Answer: Equatorial Guinea, the
continent's third-largest producer of oil after Nigeria and Angola. Its
population of just 650 000 people in this tiny country should enjoy a standard
of living approximating that of the average citizen of Portugal, which it
closely matched in terms of GDP per capita, at more than $20 000 (R232 000).
South Africa's GDP per capita is just over $6 600.

The riddle: Why does 80% of
Equatorial Guinea's population live in abject poverty? According to the UN,
fewer than half its population has access to clean drinking water. About 15% of
Equatorial Guinea's children die before reaching the age of five.

According to a recent article in
the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal, it is "one of the deadliest
places on the planet to be young".

The simple reason for the wealth
gap was explained in the same article.

"Energy revenues, derived
from pumping around 346 000 barrels per day, have flowed into the pockets of
the country's elite, but virtually none has trickled down to the poor
majority."

Of course, given the collapsing
price of crude oil, the country's ruling elite might be soon be less rich than
they are currently. But they've done pretty well since Teodoro Obiang Nguema
Mbasogo seized power in 1979 in a bloody coup against his uncle.

Today he enjoys, along with his
great riches, the awkward title of being "Africa's longest-serving
dictator”.

That award, conferred on him
last year by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, jostles along with others
awarded to the great man and his regime.

"Worst of the worst"
was Freedom House's description of the state of the country's political and
civil rights. Reporters Without Borders, which monitors the state of media
freedom in the world, described Obiang as a "predator of press freedom'',
and Transparency International places Equatorial Guinea in the top 12 of its
list of the "most corrupt states in the world".

But if you think the father is
bad, the son is apparently even worse.

Teodoro Jr, recently installed
by his dad as the country's vice-president, is also a prodigious collector of
real estate across the world. This includes a home, recently condemned as
rat-infested, in Cape Town's Clifton Beach. But this pales in comparison to his
Paris mansion, estimated to be worth more than R1.35-billion.

The headline-catcher for
"Junior" was his pile in Malibu Beach, California. It was seized,
along with a Gulfstream jet, Michael Jackson memorabilia and eight Ferraris by
US Justice Department officials. In court papers, the prosecution averred that
his riches were a consequence of corruption and were "inconsistent with
his state salary of less than $100 000 per year". Last year, to settle the
criminal indictment, Obiang forfeited some $34-million of these assets to the
US government.

Needless to say, back here in
the more modest (even Nkandla seems a shack by comparison) South Africa, there
is no "boycott, disinvest and sanction" campaign against Equatorial
Guinea and its ruling family. Standard Bank, the sole African sponsor of the
CAF — which is highlighting this benighted country — is not having any of its
branches picketed or boycotted.

No, we reserve our ire and concern
for human rights for one country, and just one chain store that stocks its
products: Israel and Woolworths.

Strangely enough, Obiang and his
dictatorship was once described by George W Bush's Secretary of State,
Condoleezza Rice as "our good friend". Hardly surprising since,
pre-fracking at least, most of that country's oil exports went to the US. But
Bush had a more arresting phrase as the educational-reforming governor of
Texas, before he became president. He said that accepting poor results in black
and Latino schools was the consequence of "the soft bigotry of low
expectations".

With all the current swirl and
tweeting around racism, real and imagined here, one can only assume that
holding Israel, for example, to the highest standard of human rights behaviour
and expecting nothing of the sort in, say, Equatorial Guinea is the current and
local equivalent of the soft, or loud, bigotry of low expectations. The local
BDS crowd expect every human rights box to be ticked by Israel, and hold no
mirror up at all to a slew of states far closer to us.

On the Woolworths issue, matters
become even more interesting. It was with a sense of macabre fascination that
last year we watched Cosas, going one better than the usual suspects in the
anti-Israel brigades, deposit pigs' heads in the Sea Point branch of
Woolworths. The basis for this act was to discomfort local Jewish shoppers
using the kosher section of the store. The stand-out problem here was that
there is no specific kosher section in the shop.

Yet just across the road, a
gleaming new Checkers store has an aisle of kosher and Israeli products. But
Checkers has been untouched by the boycott or any pigs' heads.

That's another riddle in a maze
of inconsistencies in this selective targeting. Is Israel the only country
worthy of protest action? And is it the fact that the chairman of Woolworths is
Jewish, or is it that it is seen to be the place where the elite shop that
makes it alone the target? As they say in the classics: "I think we should
be told."